Andy Markus believes students feel most welcome in school when they take ownership of their campus and their learning.
Markus, the assistant facilities manager at Draper Park Middle School in Utah’s Canyons school district, launched an after-school mentoring program in 2022 for students who vandalized school property. He lends students a listening ear while teaching them to care for their school.
He was named the 2025 National Education Support Professional of the Year by the National Education Association for his mentoring, which has led to cleaner buildings, but also improved students’ behavior and academic engagement.
Markus spoke with Education Week about how all school staff can support student learning and school culture. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The importance of schools’ physical environment
I got started in education through my folks. Both of them retired from public ed. They were ESPs [education support professionals] as well; my dad was a lead carpenter, and my mom was a lunch manager. My wife’s a lunch manager, too. She actually started out in my mom’s kitchen [in Utah’s Jordan school district].
I was hired in custodial [in Canyons] with the intention of transferring over into maintenance. And then once I got into custodial, I actually really, really liked it.
You’re around the kids—and I know that sounds very cliche, but kids make the job fun. There’s more of a sense of purpose, and I am driven by purpose … ‘cause you’re constantly fixing or attending to things and the needs of our staff and students.
The physical environment affects everything in these buildings. I think school pride matters.
I have no degree in psychology or anything, but I am a science nerd in all this. When you really start looking into the psychology of it, when things are dirty, not kept up, your sense is always going to be like, “I don’t really care. I just don’t want to be here.”
This school’s only 12 years old and when I took over, it was bad. When I took over, they were down two assistants. There were only two people [in custodial]. The fields were atrocious. I mean, we had dirt spots. It was patchy. It looked like garbage, full of weeds.
So my main objective when I started was the grounds, because that was the easiest thing to tackle, and it’s the first thing every single person sees. That made a big impact. They started using the fields again for P.E.; they started going back outside.
Now our fields are rented six days a week, so we constantly have people, and the community’s back to using them again.
Once that started, all these changes started happening. Kids started going outside more [during lunch] ‘cause now they weren’t milling around in mud. The school was cleaner, the overall happiness level in the whole building changed.
Getting students involved in maintaining the school
In the elementary [school], we started a deal with our [special education] kids in our behavior unit. … With my son being autistic, severely autistic, I had more of an understanding of these kiddos; a lot of them were on the spectrum. These kids thrived on rewards and … they loved my vacuums, my tools.
At the end of the week, ... they could work with me, they could play with the vacuum. They loved it, and it turned into this huge thing in the school. It moved from just [special education] to even our more troubled kids.
When I went to the middle school, that was around the time of the TikTok challenges, and it was horrible. Absolutely horrible. … Most of these kids, they’re good kids, but kids love attention whether it’s negative or positive, and they will seek out that attention.
They were ripping mirrors off walls, bathroom stall doors, [ripping out] toilets, urinals were getting yanked off walls, and sinks—and then they would record it on TikTok, and it would be a big thing.
So I came up with the plan of, why don’t we let them work with us [after school] and work it off? We were worried about the pushback—well, parents and the community absolutely loved it when we started these after-school programs.
We had one kid who ended up being one of my best sweepers—of our student employees—when he was on the verge of being kicked out of our district. He was nothing but a handful at school, but he was great with us. And after two years when he was with me, he went to high school—he just notified me, he’s on track to graduate now. He’s on the honor roll. He’s planning on going to college and doing business management, which is what my degree’s in.
One of the things I really tried to instill in them is no matter what you do, whether it’s good or bad, your actions will always affect other people, whether it’s your parents, family, or others in the building. That’s really what’s been resonating with these kids, because most of ‘em don’t think that way. They’re like, “Well, it just affects me and my friends.”
Once we got them, then word started traveling through the school from students: “Hey, don’t bust this up there. Our custodial people are actually pretty cool guys.”
The school got cleaner. And then there was more pride with the kids. We started watching them as they were walking down the halls. They’d throw stuff in the garbage cans—when I started, we were sweeping the floors eight times a day. That mentoring program has made such a huge difference. We no longer had kids running all over tables in the cafeteria. They weren’t throwing food.
Building respect for support staff
[Utah’s new law banning collective bargaining for public workers] was pure hell, I’m not even gonna deny it. We spent countless, and I mean countless, hours dealing with that—meeting with legislators, getting the [repeal] referendum. Right now that law is on pause until November when it’s on the ballot, and currently the public is up in arms over this bill, so I don’t foresee it sticking. I am nervous that they’re already in the process of coming up with a new one.
A lot of people look at [education support professionals] as, “you’re uneducated, so that’s why you’re in the position you are"—but most of us in facilities [management] in Utah have degrees, we all have education. Most of us had our own businesses; I did before this.
If there’s one thing I could really get out, it would be the recognition of education support professionals. They’re not [honored] in every state or even districts or buildings. They’re there, but people don’t know them.
Without ESPs, schools would go in the toilet real fast—for my job, literally go down the toilet.
